DG4S-08020 servo drive

[thosj]

I have 4 D4GS-08020 drives coming to upgrade Gecko G320x's in a working system. I'm surprised there aren't some better instructions somewhere. Like, do I need to have the motors disconnected from the ball screws or can I leave them and nothing will run wild? Does the ServoConfigurator software run the motors or do I run IT and then run Mach beside it to run the motors? The doc explains all about it, underdamped, overdamped, critically damped, on and on, but nothing about how to do it. If there was something, even for different motors, maybe I could understand. Is there such a thing, pdf or YouTube, anything? While waiting for my drives from CNC4PC I've searched high and low and can't find anything that tells me what I'll need to do?

Maybe it'll all be abundantly clear once I have the drives, line driver converters, and programming stick!!!

Tom

[cncdrive]

The Servoconfig3 software can do a so called 1(t) step response analysation. The software is not to control the motor, it is only to do an analysation.
I suggest you read after 1(t) step response analysation.
In short, it is a signal which changes a known amount of amplitude in zero time and this signal is very often used in automatition to check loops properties and stability etc., it is basicly the most often used checking signal.
In servo motor position control this 1(t) signal means that the position in the drive changes from one position to another and it changes in a moment in other words immediately without ramp and then the drive will compensate, it will move the motor to the new position and the movement positions are drawn on the screen as a position/time graph which graph can be used to analyse the tuning goodness and after that you can change the parameters based on what you see on the graph.

You may tune the drive with or without the motors connected to a load, however when there is no load or there are different size and type of loads usually different PID values will be optimal which means you will have to adjust the tuning parameters.

Tuning a drive is not as simple as 1*1. Control theory is a 3 semester learning on the University with some real heavy math.
However to understand just PID tuning to a level that you need to understand it to successfully tune the drives the documentation we have should be enough and if you want to understand it a bit deeper then google after PID controller and read some articles.